Get rid of the operating system!

High performance cloud computing is nix

Nix mark I was joint work of Laboratorio de Sistemas with Bell Laboratories, Sandia National Labs, and Vitanuova.
Mark II incorporated an open development model, and
found its way into 9tom
and the kernel
can be found along with other kernels in the distribution. Thanks to Erik
Quanstrom for maintaining the distribution and adopting the system. This
version is still evolving there.
Nix mark IV is a new research prototype for the system. It is
joint work of Lsub with with Bell Laboratories and Vitanuova.
Most desktop and laptop machines today, even phones, are multicore. But OSes are
still built as decades ago. Nix is able to lend cores to applications with no OS interference
(not even clock interrupts), but still provides all functionality of a conventional operating
system.

In particular, for applications, Nix is not different from a Plan 9 from Bell Labs kernel.
However, Nix can partition cores into:

TCs: Time-sharing cores. Similar to cores as handled by SMP systems.

ACs: Application cores. User code runs undisturbed on them.

KCs: Kernel cores. They take system load like system calls and interrupt handling.

Cores can change their role at run-time, depending on the actual system load.

This is most useful for HPC applications but also for Cloud Computing,
because of both performance and convenience.

Software

For nix Mark II, the main development tree was hosted at sources.lsub.org.
We are developing the Mark IV version of the kernel, which can be found in the
same place.

and the prototype mark IV kernel at
nix.tgz. This one is intended to be used with a
standard
Plan 9 system, and is still work in progress, is more advanced than the mark II,
but does not yet include the Mark II ACs.

Authors

The mark I system started as joint work of the
Laboratorio de Sistemas, Bell Laboratories, Sandia National Labs,
and Vitanuova.
This was the initial list of authors on the early days. More people has contributed
to the software as of now.

Francisco J Ballesteros

Noah Evans

Charles Forsyth

Gorka Guardiola

Jim McKie

Ron Minnich

Enrique Soriano

The mark II system incorporated other authors, listed in the
CONTRIBUTORS file in the distribution.
The mark IV system is authored jointly by Lsub, Bell Labs, and Vitanuova (as of now). Once it's complete, we will update the CONTRIBUTORS file
before distributing it.